In last week’s first preview of the next-generation PaGaLGuY, we introduced you to the upcoming ‘Follow’ feature, and how your experience with the new PaGaLGuY will revolve around following people, discussions and articles.
We strongly believe that online communities aren’t as much about the information posted in them, as they are about the inherent goodness of the people who populate them. The more the people share and the more they help each other, the stronger the community grows. The second major version of PaGaLGuY therefore had to put people and their voice to the forefront.
The ability to Follow people on the new PaGaLGuY made us rethink and redesign User Profiles from scratch. Take a look at the screenshot below (click for the full image)…
User Profiles in the new PaGaLGuY shall make it easy for your followers to track your Pings and participate in discussions around them. Your followers can also keep track of the discussion threads, articles and fellow user Pings you are commenting in.
This one change would immediately enhance the way you stay in touch with the network that you have built on PaGaLGuY. Not only that, it will make the discovery of interesting people in the PaGaLGuY community and the ability to converse with them a lot easier.
Additionally, at this stage, we foresee User Profiles being used in the following ways:
1. You would track the top CAT performers on PaGaLGuY and never miss out on the discussions they are participating in, the Pings they are making about their preparation plan and progress and the peer group they have formed around their big shot at a top b-school. We expect that the most helpful and sharing-friendly bunch would quickly build a large following and in turn help them connect to more interesting people in the community.
2. In a similar way, you would be able to follow Pings by b-school Students and Alumni and have direct conversations with them.
3. Test Preparation companies would have user accounts on PaGaLGuY and run, say, their own ‘Quant Question of the Day’ type services. All they need to do is Ping a quant question everyday, around which discussions would get built in the Ping comments. You could follow these channels to get a regular stream of questions on your Live Feed everyday.
If you like the knowledge that such a test-preparation company is Pinging, you would follow it. If their quality drops or they enter the spam territory, you would Unfollow them.
4. B-schools, both Indian and international, would start official user accounts and Ping updates about admission schedules, application deadlines, interesting activities on their campus or festivals and events. It’s the best way for b-schools to reach out to their potential applicants on the website that arguably has the largest number of MBA applicants in India tuned in all day.
For example, some b-school might decide to theme their Pings around ‘How to work towards a career in Finance’. Another could take up ‘Cracking admission interviews’ as a subject and be the best source of insights on the subject using its account on PaGaLGuY.
For MBA applicants, it’s the best way to stay informed about b-schools that they target to join.
On our part, we will continuously track interesting active users on PaGaLGuY and recommend you who to follow, like in the following screenshot,
Sharing is caring
Connecting with other puys is further made easy by the ‘Share’ feature, which allows you to point the puys in your network to something interesting that you found on PaGaLGuY.
Let’s say, you are reading an article on PaGaLGuY’s MBA News section and would like to Share it with your followers. You would click on the Share link just above the comments…
And see such a box open up,
Leave an accompanying comment, click on the Share button and it gets posted for your Followers to see,
Not just articles, you can Share individual forum thread posts that you find interesting with your followers using a similar Share link inside discussion threads,
And it would get Pinged to all your followers.
While the community guidelines and posting rules on the existing PaGaLGuY forum made for high-quality knowledge and information in the threads, they also prevented an entire set of important players in the industry surrounding MBA and business schools from participating on PaGaLGuY. With these changes on the new PaGaLGuY platform, especially the Profiles, Pings and Follow features, we foresee coaching institutes, b-schools and other contributors of the business education sector provide new and useful services to MBA aspirants.
In the future, we will develop specialized apps for higher levels of audience interaction. But while we do this, we will continue to be thoughtful about keeping the content quality high, through the right community guidelines, features and incentives.
What do you think? More features in the next post.